Gregory White Smith, wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning biography on Pollock, dead at 62

Gregory White Smith, a Harvard-trained lawyer, businessman, philanthropist and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who raised hackles in the art world with an intensely psychological examination of the life and work of Jackson Pollock, has died. He was 62.

Smith died Thursday at his home in Aiken, S.C., of a rare brain tumor diagnosed nearly 40 years ago, said his husband and co-author, Steven Naifeh.

Naifeh and Smith won the Pulitzer Prize in biography for "Jackson Pollock: An American Saga," which was published in 1990 and spurred the 2000 movie "Pollock," starring Ed Harris.

It was one of five best-selling books the two men wrote together, including "Van Gogh: The Life" (2011), which drew international attention with its challenging of the widely held theory that Van Gogh's death at 37 had been a suicide. The authors offered evidence pointing to an accidental shooting by some troublemaking youths.

The Van Gogh biography, which took 10 years to write, was praised by many critics as a magisterial work, rich with insights into the personal and intellectual underpinnings of the tortured artist's influential paintings.

"What Mr. Naifeh and Mr. Smith capture so powerfully is Van Gogh's extraordinary will to learn, to persevere against the odds, to keep painting when early teachers disparaged his work," Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times. Time magazine called it "this generation's definitive portrait of the great Dutch post-Impressionist."

The Pollock book, based on eight years of research and 2,000 interviews, was commended for a narrative style that made it read "like a novel, only better," critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in Elle magazine.

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But a number of Smith and Naifeh's major points -- including information about Pollock's sexual orientation and an "obsession with urination" that may have contributed to his famous drip technique of painting -- were widely disparaged by critics, who dismissed much of the book as gossip and reductive Freudianism.

One of these was leading Pollock authority Francis V. O'Connor, who, in a 1991 essay for The New York Times, wrote that the award of the Pulitzer Prize only proved that "pop psychologizing and amateur art criticism are now acceptable methods of cultural discourse."

In an email last week O'Connor said, "I have no reason today to disagree with myself."

To O'Connor and others, one of the most egregious parts of the book was the authors' obsession with Pollock urination anecdotes: Smith and Naifeh reported that the artist peed in flower pots, Peggy Guggenheim's fireplace and on the Prometheus statue in Rockefeller Center, a pattern of behavior that dates to a childhood memory of seeing his father relieve himself on a rock in a field.